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The 1970 Game

December 30, 2010

For the last decade arguments for renewable energy have mainly been made by environmental groups like NC-WARN.

While their experts, like former Duke chancellor John Blackburn, have done important work showing that the costs of renewable power and its alternatives are crossing, and will continue to cross, these reports are still subject to fisking by skeptics who claim their views on climate change color their research.

Economic arguments have to scale in the real economy to become effective.

Because past solar facilities didn't scale to their needs utilities like Georgia Power are still going ahead with new, giant nuclear plants, and pushing through rate hikes based on them, arguing that regardless of costs such plants scale to meet demand, while renewables just don't.

The good news is these high-priced plants bring the point of cost crossover closer by raising utility rates where they have traditionally been low.

December 08, 2010

Thanks to the recent U.S. election, which put proponents of resources firmly in charge of Congress, what I began calling "The War Against Oil" here four years ago has moved decisively from the public sector to the private.

My own study of history tells me this is where it should have been all along. Political change follows economic change. It's based on economic demands.

What works in the marketplace demands an end to government subsidies of what no longer works, and it's this market power that drives the change, although historians seldom write things up that way because it sounds communist.

It's not. It's pure Adam Smith (right). Smith himself was a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, the intellectual movement that gave us the Industrial Revolution, the frameworks of democracy, and such religious movements as unitarianism. He based his work on the idea that most people are decent, even big businesspeople, and that problems are addressed best when they are turned into opportunities.

So there's a reason we haven't seen Al Gore lately. He's been looking at deals with John Doerr, preparing a Cox-like revenge, untold wealth for his children and grandchildren.

In business, you only seek publicity when you need it. When you want to attract capital, or sell something, then you seek publicity. Otherwise you stay silent.

December 06, 2010

The difference between solar power and resource power isn't just pollution, or current costs, or the color green.

It's about trends.

Resource energy is going to get more expensive, and bringing it up to the surface will continue to cost lives. Solar energy is going to get cheaper, as technology changes. Eventually the two lines cross. Just because they haven't crossed yet does that mean we stop pushing toward solar breakthroughs, or give all our subsidies to coal, or stop buying solar systems?

A quick look at the news shows enormous progress. And it's important to note that progress is happening across the board -- in gear being made today for shipment in the next year, in gear which may come out in 2012, and theoretically.

Breakthroughs are needed on efficiency, on cost, and on durability, as well as total capacity. New plants continue to come online. Current technology, based on the same construction techniques used to make silicon chips, has greater efficiency right now than thin films made of copper, indium, gallium selenide (CIGS), but CIGS efficiency is improving, and on a per-watt basis it should prove better than silicon soon.

This doesn't mean silicon is giving up. In fact, because it's a tested technology, silicon advances are coming onto the market faster than CIGS. Sharp has begun mass production of new cells with a back contact structure and improved alignment. It estimates production for next year alone at the equivalent of 200 megawatts.

Intevac, meanwhile, just bought Solar Implant Technologies with an eye toward bringing SIT's ion implant module to market in its LEAN SOLAR production system. Note that in both these cases we're looking at serious improvements to readily-manufactured systems and immediate production.

But don't just look at silicon and CIGS. Konarka produces a thin, flexible plastic with an efficiency rating of "only" 8.3%, but the flexibility and low cost of what it calls "power plastic" give it many market advantages.

Thin film polymers can become even more efficient. Iowa State researchers (above) think they can improve the efficiency of thin films by 20% with a very thin substrate that adds texture and can capture twice the light of flat cells. This is a manufacturing technique, which could make thin films as efficient as silicon or CIGS within a very short time.

November 30, 2010

I have switched full time to a new beat -- devices which harvest the energy all around us.

In terms of this technology transformation, we're about where PCs and the Internet were at time time in 1970. Back then, you'll remember, Intel was just starting work on what would become the 4004 chip and a researcher had just sent-and-received the first online message.

Skepticism abounded. Computers were seen as giant machines useful only in accounting and scientific applications. New "minicomputers" from companies like Digital Equipment Corp. were starting to drive prices down. But the main interfaces remained the punch card and the print out.

We're at the same stage today with energy technology. Skeptics abound. Working, cost-effective systems seem thin on the ground.

Windmills work, the technology is stable, but they cost big money to erect, they do require maintenance, and each new windmill increases our supply of wind energy by one unit. Geothermal units work best where a source of Earth heat is relatively too close to the surface (to minimize drilling and energy loss from lifting the hot water) but the underlying rock structure is stable. We have not yet learned how to tap volcanoes.

November 29, 2010

One of the great amusements of my life is looking at how technology was portrayed in the past.

It's fun because it's usually wrong. The issues are portrayed, but views of the future are always locked inside their own time.

Take computers, for instance.

Information is at the heart of most business processes, and the inefficiency of this process sparked many of our great dystopic visions. Those untold rows of desks in Metropolis are based on the same false assumptions about the future which marked Marxism and Luddism. A refusal to see problems for what they are, namely a business opportunity.

The first assumption with any new technology's introduction is that it will concentrate wealth and leave people impoverished. This was also true for computers. Even an innocent movie like Desk Set, perhaps the least-known Tracy-Hepburn romance, was driven by the idea that a computer Tracy sold for Hepburn's network research department would leave her without a job.

It's silly, naive. More never leads to less. More leads to more.

When computers were becoming microprocessors, 40 years ago, few believed today's abundance of computing resources was even possible. Digital Equipment CEO Ken Olsen notably questioned whether every home would ever need a PC, but my home today has 7 dedicated, general purpose PCs in it. And most everything else here is computerized, designed by computers, absolutely infected with them.

Your home is probably the same way.

Just as computers in our time eased the fears of a previous generation, so manufacturing transformed the world before that. Each generation's breakthroughs end the previous one's nightmares, and are built on top of that previous generation's breakthroughs.

That's why dreams are important.

Dreams like the original Star Trek series and Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 brought the possibilities of computer control to the American mind. They inspired my generation. But when I was a teenager I could not believe I would make my life around computers. Most of my Rice classmates have made their careers in this field. We're all a little surprised at just how profitable it has been.

It happened because of innovations that took place while we were in school. Ethernet. Arpanet. The microprocessor. Souls for new machines.

November 19, 2010

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 47 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

When I first started studying our political history here and looked for patterns, almost five years ago now, it was with the assumption that political change leads society's changes.

What I have found is just the opposite. Politics lags, badly. It always lags.

The political subtext of the TV show "Mad Men" involves politics. The agency is contacted by the 1960 Nixon campaign, but the campaign eventually backs away. As time goes by the protagonist, Don Draper, increasingly identifies himself with the Nixon story of the "self made man." In next year's final season, my guess is he'll be falling and flailing, but the political habits of his future life will be set in stone. And the Nixon order will finally come in.

The Nixon Thesis, in other words, wasn't created by his 1968 victory, nor by Spiro Agnew's 1969 speeches. It was set in motion by previous events. Society leads politics.

But which society changes are we talking about? Not the kind you think.

October 29, 2010

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 44 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

One of the big untold stories of this election cycle was just how easy it was to avoid the hoopla.

Like millions of others I no longer have a wired phone, just cell phones. So I never heard from a pollster. Like millions of others I spend more time online than in front of the TV, so I missed the flood of TV ads as well.

As a result I was inoculated. I could find out about it in my own way, from sources I trusted, and ignore the rest. When reporters complain about people getting all their news from Fox, or Comedy Central, it's a point they're missing.

October 22, 2010

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 43 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

You can't say a new political thesis even exists until it is fully engaged.

The election of a crisis leader does not always engage the Thesis, as the election of Abraham Lincoln precipitated the Civil War. It's not until the crisis leader sees the real problem of his time, the real obstacles, and calls upon the will of the people that the process begins.

After the crisis election of 1896, it took nearly five years for Theodore Roosevelt to issue his call against the "Trusts." After the crisis election of 1932, it was not until the Supreme Court called the New Deal unconstitutional that the issue was engaged.

This is not unusual.

No matter what happens in the coming elections, it's a good thing. The President is being pushed to confront political enemies, to embrace his political base, and to seek a message that will save both him and his party.

The economic crisis the President confronted was not the crisis we in fact face. It was a symptom of a deeper economic problem, the economics of scarcity.

The economics of scarcity have defined the last decade. It's why the Texas oilagarchs got involved in politics. It's why we went to war. It's why economic growth today seems impossible -- each appearance of sustained growth is met by a rise in energy prices.

October 08, 2010

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 41 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

In that past I've discussed how political theses live and die, how they're not just political but economic, and how they expire as the media mix changes.

Another key to understanding them is they are all about new people.

Republicans began life as a coalition of capital and free labor, in the 1850s. Their coalition was renewed with the rise of distribution channels early in the last century. Democrats dominated from 1932 based on the votes of cities, while Republicans returned to power after 1968 on the strength of the suburbs.

What makes Obama unlike Carter, or Clinton, is partly the nature of his coalition. It includes all the rising forces within the country:

The new class based around universities.

Immigrants.

Young people.

Most of these folks had not voted before. Young people were notorious for under-voting. Immigrants were invisible, and the "new class" didn't seem to exist before the 1990s.

A key point in the development of any political thesis comes when people are called out explicitly to support it.

That's what is happening on the Mall this October 30. It may be the most important political event of the year, putting the politics of our time on trial and calling for its rejection.

The President hasn't done this. A comedian has. And to the nattering classes it sounds crazy. Only, in the context of our time, crazy is the only truth. When everyone else is afraid to speak truth to power it becomes the job of the jester.

To the President's supporters it's baffling. Because as Obama made clear in his recent CNBC appearance, which drew such negative reviews from the nattering classes, he's not raging at his enemies and, thus, not putting "a human face" on the ideals they marched for, or the continuing struggle to put them into practice.

Well, I happen to have watched the CNBC appearance. All of it. What I saw were hard questions from frightened people of means, and a calm man at the center discussing choices that had to be made, and those which still have to be made.

He treated the people who asked the questions, and who watched on TV, like grownups. There was no shouting. There was a limited range of emotion, because emotion is not helpful. He was Yoda, not Luke. He was Miyagi, not the Karate Kid. He was Eastern, not Western. (It's his Indonesianness, not his Kenyanness, that is the key to his character.)

More important, there was no call to hate and he issued no call to fear. He gave his critics credit for good intentions. Yet the dehumanizing of critics is so embedded in the Nixon Thesis of Conflict that we can't conceive of politics being any other way.